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Introduction to Text System User Interface Layer

Contents:

Who Should Read This Document
Organization of This Document
See Also

Text System User Interface Layer describes the high-level user interface to the Cocoa text system through the NSTextView class.

Who Should Read This Document

You should read this document if your application needs to present a user interface to the full capabilities of the text system, that is, if your users need to edit substantial amounts of text.

To understand this material you should have a general understanding of Cocoa programming conventions, and you should have read Text System Overview.

Organization of This Document

This document contains the following articles:

• “The User-Interface Layer: NSTextView Class” describes the capabilities and features of the NSTextView class, through which most applications interact with the text system.

• “Creating an NSTextView Object” explains how to instantiate an NSTextView object using Interface Builder.

• “Creating an NSTextView Programmatically” explains how to create an NSTextView object in code and cause it to create its supporting web of text-handling objects.

• “Putting an NSTextView Object in an NSScrollView” shows how to programmatically configure an NSTextView object with scroll bars.

• “Using Multiple NSTextViews” describes the attributes held in common by multiple text views configured to share a single layout manager.

• “Plain and Rich Text Objects” explains the difference between plain text and rich text and lists the RTF control words that any text object recognizes.

• “Setting Text Attributes” discusses text attributes and the action methods you can use to control them programmatically.

• “Setting Text Margins” describes the values, maintained by various text system objects, that affect the apparent margins surrounding text on a printed page or display.

See Also

For more information, refer to the following documents:

• Text System Overview provides an overview of the Cocoa text system.

• Text Editing Programming Guide for Cocoa explains how the text system supports entering and modifying text and attributes through user interaction with the user interface layer.

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